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Proposed countermeasures to fight spam?

12-30-2006, 03:08 PM

Hello there,

although the Phoronix Forums are still somewhat low-traffic, I really enjoy reading and posting here. We may be a rather small community, but also a polite and knowledgeable one, and that's what counts, right?

One thing that, however, is constantly itching me, is the recurring spam that finds its way into the database every now and then.

I'd suggest some trivial set of measurements to prevent this from happening. I consider those spamming attacks to happen in an automated manner, so it should suffice to add a checkbox to each form which needs to be checked in order to be allowed to post, labelled "I confim I'm not an automated script." or so. We could also think about implementing captchas (though I personally usually fail them at least on first attempt ) to fight this problem.

I'm not up on the available plugins for this type of forum to help with the spam problem, but I'm sure there is something that would help. Although there is quite a bit of spam here compared to other places, it seems to be taken care of very fast... very rarely do I see a spam post making it more than a day.

Comment

We've been working on fighting this spam. It seems to mostly hit just our General Discussion forum. Any specific plug-in recommendations for vBulletin are welcome as we actively work on addressing this situation.

Comment

Some changes were implemented to hopefully reduce the amount of spam. Seeing as most of the spam is coming from users with registered email addresses like @123.com and like @fdsfdsfada.info, etc those types of addresses should now be banned from registering.